An order fulfillment and sourcing engine touches every aspect of an e-retailer's business, e.g., warehouse inventory, fulfillment center processing capacity, and outbound shipments. Business users need a BI (business intelligence) dashboard tool or like data visualization tool for displaying the current status of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) and monitor KPIs performance, diagnose operational disruptions and find solutions in real time.
The standard practice in the industry is to monitor business KPIs for an order fulfillment system in real time. However, such practice only tracks the outcomes of the order fulfillment optimization system, and does not provide explicit and automatic root cause analysis when a business KPI deteriorates.
Business users have to perform ad-hoc data analysis to diagnose a problem, which could take very long before finding a solution. If the order fulfillment system goes offline due to the delayed diagnosis, the retailer could lose millions of dollars in sales.